My Blog

Bella Italia, Viva INORE

I have been studying marine renewable energy since September 2002 so, at the time of writing, nearly 13 years. Sadly, to my discredit, I have not always taken all of the opportunities that studying in this unique field have offered me. One such opportunity was to become actively involved in a young researchers network called INORE during my PhD. This was a time of my life where I was bitter, big headed and small minded (gotta love PhDs), and so, rather than try it out, I simply heaped scorn on my friends that were involved.

I like to think that I’ve changed since then, and I am becoming more like the person I want to be. Yet still, when another opportunity to attend INORE came along, familiar sentiments returned: “I’m too old”, “I’m not that kind of person”, “Why would I waste my time?”. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My closest colleague could have gone instead of me but, fortunately for me, he seemed less enthusiastic to go than I did. Indeed, I know now that he was saying this for my benefit as he is one of the world’s super nice people. It also made sense from a technical perspective as we needed to present a piece software that he can’t use, as yet. That piece of software is DTOcean - my current charge and will be for the next 15 months. I have a lot to thank DTOcean for as, along with the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, it has brought me to Bilbao and an exciting (and challenging) new life.

I will say more about DTOcean at a later date, as we have just begun to publicise its existence and there is lots of interesting stuff to tell (maybe even a slot at Europython (woo!). The presentation at INORE, in Vico Equense in southern Italy, was the 3rd of a group of four presentations of our “Alpha version” over 2 months, a period throughout which the software has been getting more alpha all the time. Sadly, including some intense preparation time, this has stolen a good 3 months of my social life (and Spanish learning), so I hope Derwyn (my pet name for DTOcean) appreciates my sacrifice. The last presentation is next week.

I did not have my travelling hat on when I arrived in Italy, and was feeling a bit out of sorts. These feelings quickly faded, however. Firstly, I had a calzone. Secondly, Vico Equense is incredibly stunning.

Mount Vesuvius

Piano di Sorrento

Peppe's hand

The hand you see in the last picture is that of my bed and breakfast host, Peppe. The pictures above were taken because of his generosity in offering me a hair raising ride on the back of his moped for an hour long tour of the locality about Vico Equense. This was truly one of the best experiences of my life, so if you ever happen to stay at the Bed & Breakfast Maria Grazia and Peppe offers you a ride, take it. The B&B is also a lovely building and he has some of the largest lemons I’ve ever seen… Just remember to take a car, as it’s a bit isolated.

Huge lemons

So it was a good start to my journey, and the next stage was to meet the INORE gang at the hostel up the road. Now, I wouldn’t say that I didn’t know anybody, in fact a colleague from my current work was attending along with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh. The joy was that I hardly spoke to them throughout much of my time there as I met with such a nice welcome from the group as a whole. OK, everyone was looking a little tired (the days and nights are long at INORE), but this had not dampened the open and inclusive spirit of the group. Indeed, this will be my enduring memory of the trip, feeling at home among like-minded people and having fun with old friends and, I hope, new ones as well. I will remember that feeling, and also seeing one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life from the roof of the hostel; one of those perfect little moments of life.

Sunset

Beyond a great social experience, the trip also proved very useful from a work perspective. The feedback we received from the group of young researchers after my presentation of DTOcean was very detailed and thought through, and really highlighted the embarrassment of young intellect in the room. From both an intellectual and social perspective I left INORE totally satisfied.

In fact, I was extremely sad to leave when I did (two and a half days before the end), and upset with myself for never taking the risk to try it when I could justify spending the entire week there. If I could, I would have gone back instantly and implored everyone else to stay in that beautiful place for ever more. Still, life goes on but if you are a young researcher in offshore energy and have ever thought of trying INORE or even if you think its not for you, I would urge you to give it a try and not make the same mistake as me. I feel extremely lucky and privileged to get a second chance, but I wish I had taken my first.

Teething Troubles: Responsive Menus in Hyde

So, after looking so nice on desktop and mobile, it turns out that dataonlygreater.com has some problems when it comes to ipads. I first noticed this on my Dad’s ipad, but there is also a neat online tool called Screenfly that will let you see your website using the resolution of many different devices. The results of looking at the Academic page using ipad resolutions were like this:

ipad view

Now Hyde is a fully resposive template for Jekyll, meaning that it should display well on all devices, by rearranging itself or modifying the text size. I did make one change to the base Hyde configuration, in this respect, changing a number of the “@media” CSS commands from

@media (min-width: 48em)

to

@media (min-width: 48em) and (min-height: 32em)

The main navigation is in the side menu, so the problem with the first command was that if the screen height was small, and the width was wide, the menu would be lost and you could not navigate the site any more. This was the only “flaw” I found in the stock Hyde template.

Rather than Hyde, the problem that has shown itself with the navigation buttons on ipads is of my own doing. These navigation buttons were one of the last additions I made before launching the site (perhaps that’s why I didn’t test it as well as I should have!) and are modifications of Code a Responsive Navigation Menu by Joshua Johnson. To make them fit into the responsiveness method of Hyde, which uses min-widths, I changed the CSS styles of the menus to this:

@media (min-width: 48em) {
	.navmenu.academic nav li a {
	    width: 31%;
	    font: 400 1.5rem 'Luckiest Guy', cursive;
	    margin: 4px;
	}
}

The problem here is that I have not been very sympathetic to the way that Hyde changes with increasing width. There are, in fact, 3 different stages once the sidebar is to the left, including a font size change and a margin size change. These changes occur at 54em and 64em, with the switch to the left sidebar starting at 48em. So, I needed to add more responsiveness in the navigation buttons to cope with these changes.

My solution then was to keep the stacked menu until the font size changes at 54em and then add two more font size changes in the menu buttons at “full-screen” (80em) and an intermediate stage (72em) where the font is becoming a bit lost in the button. So the new CSS looks like this:

@media (min-width: 58em) {
	.navmenu.academic nav li a {
	    width: 32%;
	    font: 400 0.7rem 'Luckiest Guy', cursive;
	}
	.navmenu.academic nav small {
	    font: 100 0.65rem Helvetica, sans-serif;
    }
}

@media (min-width: 72em) {
	.navmenu.academic nav li a {
	    font: 400 1rem 'Luckiest Guy', cursive; 
    }
	.navmenu.academic nav small {
	    font: 100 0.7rem Helvetica, sans-serif;
    }
}

@media (min-width: 80em) {
	.navmenu.academic nav li a {
	    margin: 6px 2px;
	    font: 400 1.25rem 'Luckiest Guy', cursive;
	}
	.navmenu.academic nav small {
	    font: 100 0.8rem Helvetica, sans-serif;
    }
}

Thus we now have a functioning 3-column in page navigation menu for Hyde, and the Software page has a 2-column menu. Nonetheless, these menu solutions need a great deal of tailoring depending on the contents and the environment they are deployed into, so, sadly, I don’t think this will ever be a simple cut and paste solution for other Hyde bases projects.

Unofficial dataonlygreater.com Launch Party

I am pleased to announce the unofficial launch of www.dataonlygreater.com. Note, it is the unofficial launch in case we can have a better party with an official opening. Here is a nice picture of Augusta and I enjoying the festivities.

Party!

So what are we celebrating? Well dataonlygreater is the new conduit for me, Mathew Topper, (find out more about me here) to express my most geeky thoughts (both personal and professional) and share some of the stuff I have been working on, in some ways for the greater good, i.e. open source code.

Currently, the content here is mostly a collection of other work that was still available on the web (mathematicaltopper.wordpress.com, marineresearcher.wordpress.com) or are beyond my control or closed (www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/iesscicomp, www.see.ed.ac.uk/~mtopper). The wordpress blogs I will be shutting down as repeated content is bad and the inability to access the other stuff was one of my primary reasons for doing this anyway.

I should say that none of this would have been possible without the amazing piece of software that is Jekyll. Its a great system that I thoroughly recommend you try. I must also thank @mdo for developing Hyde and Joshua Lande for showing me the way. This template is the backbone of the site you see before you. There are also many little concepts and styles that I have pinched from places across the web, so thanks for sharing!

Well, that’s it. Hopefully I will be adding more content on a regular basis and improving what is already here. And, if you’re here looking for the University of Edinburgh Thesis template, don’t worry the page you need is here. Thanks for popping by!